Tenure lawsuit could create better California schools: Editorial

There’s still a good reason for academic tenure in this country — at the collegiate level, where it was created, to ensure academic freedom of thought and speech.

At the secondary and elementary levels of teaching, while those freedoms certainly need rigorous protection, it’s not so much of an issue.

And tenure in California’s public schools is an awful lot easier to get than in a university, where it is granted mostly to scholars who not only have their Ph.D.s, but who have jumped through the many hoops on the way from lecturer to assistant professor to associate professor through a combination of published research and teaching ability.

California teachers in our elementary, middle and high schools get tenure — including significant protection from being fired for cause — after about 18 months of service. That’s a very low bar indeed for any profession.

So the legal debate on the issue of tenure for teachers that began Monday in a Los Angeles courtroom as the result of a lawsuit seeking to end it is a welcome one, and one way into the question of just what is plaguing the public schools in our state and our nation. The answer to that question is certainly not solely the ability to get rid of lower-performing or otherwise problematic teachers. The president of one of the state’s teacher unions gets off a good line when quoting Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond: “You can’t fire your way to Finland,” where the students famously do so well on standardized tests.

No, California wouldn’t become a middle-class Scandinavian paradise if we were to win the right to let principals get rid of lousy teachers simply because they are lousy.

And, no, if the second part of the lawsuit were to triumph as well — a quest to get rid of union rules that make pure longevity on the job a key factor in who gets to keep teacher jobs when layoffs are necessary — we wouldn’t see a hundred-point rise in the average school’s API score overnight.

We would just return a modicum of logic to the educational workplace, the same kind of logic that is at play where most of us work. Executives — the school board, in this case, and the superintendent — would be allowed to hire good managers determined to meet goals. The managers — principals — would be allowed to hire the teachers they think will be the best-equipped to do so. If a teacher turns out after a couple of years to be either mediocre or a real problem, he or she would get fired — just as the rest of us are when we don’t perform our jobs well.

And, no, when revenues drop and a general layoff is instituted, managers wouldn’t be forced to keep only the old-timers, even if younger teachers were clearly better.

That’s the essence of the suit filed by Silicon Valley mogul David F. Welch, an activist along the lines of former Washington, D.C., schools boss Michelle Rhee, who got rid of tenure in her district and was able to cull some deadwood — until she was swept out herself by an anti-reform board.

In coming weeks you’ll hear a lot of union rhetoric about job protection being the reason for both tenure and first-in, last-out layoff practices. Look — Californians of good will value the vast majority of teachers who do a fine job, and would agree we need to find a way to pay our best teachers more. But this suit has merit, and the state will have better schools if it succeeds.